Beardbox

A videomusical self-portrait.
Berlin
2009

Tue, Dec 22, 2009  Permanent link
Categories: videos

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Augmented Reality vs. Aura Recognition [part 3]
Project: Polytopia

This post was first published as part three of a series of three posts on Augmentology 1[L]0[L]1

Part 3: The Crystal Ball



Film Still, The Wizard of Oz.

During the 1939 film version of The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy visits Professor Marvel and has him read her fortune from his crystal ball. He asks her to close her eyes and takes the opportunity to “read” the belongings in her basket. From these artifacts, Professor Marvel pieces together a story based on his intuition of the meaning of the objects and the context of Dorothy’s visit. Professor Marvel is reading Dorothy’s aura by diving into her metadata and delivers his observations in dramatic and persuasive tones.

Now imagine if Dorothy visited Professor Marvel in the 21st century. His crystal ball is a web-ready mobile device capable of scanning Dorothy’s possessions, clothes, face – maybe even her DNA. This cloud of data is cross-referenced and interlinked with Dorothy’s online profiles and he’s able to quickly conjure up an extremely detailed impression of Dorothy’s past, present and future. At the very least, he’d spot Auntie Em in Dorothy’s Flickr account and come to similar conclusions about Dorothy’s family situation as he does in the film.

As aurec technology improves it will know more and more about us; it will become better at predicting what we do and how we prefer to do it. It will enable us to customize our interactions with everything that surrounds us while also allowing us to share these preferences with others. Search is the essential experience of the web (witness Google). The web asks us “what are you looking for?” every time we use it. To understand the potential of aurec we need to be sensitized to the fact that it will reduce the importance of the question/answer relationship posed by the web and open up an environment of ambient data.

It is my hope that shared aurec experiences will have positive effects on our relationships with other people, allowing us new degrees of emotional intimacy and mutual understanding. Aurec has the potential to change our relations with natural and urban environments by revealing otherwise hidden information on a bespoke basis. This could lead to increased corporate and governmental transparency/accountability as the norm shifts to a sharing paradigm as opposed to hiding data. The more we shift our attention away from gimmicky iphone apps and focus on the broader ontological implications of aura recognition, the more aurec will have the best chances of actualization.

Special thanks to NotThisBody for brilliant insights and reflections while writing this article.

Mon, Mar 15, 2010  Permanent link
Categories: augmented reality, aurec, definitions, Oz, ubiquitous computing
Sent to project: Polytopia

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Delivered in Beta
Project: Epiphanies

Delivered in Beta
an immediated autodocumentary

How are social media changing design? What is the value of a prototype? How are work and play merging? Where is design headed in the 21st century? "Delivered in Beta" begins a conversation on these topics and invites your participation (twitter hashtag #od10beta)

This video was created during the Open Design Workshop at the Betahaus as part of Social Media Week Berlin 2010.

Conceived and edited by Gabriel Shalom
Photo editing and titles by Patrizia Kommerell
Produced by KS12



Contributions

Photos: Alex Qureitem, Christopher Doering, Tracy Rolling-Brunar, Michelle Thorne

Videos: Gabriel Shalom, Nadine Freischlad, Philip Steffan

Music:
"2% (aka rent)" by callow
"the overly distorted truth about your power distribution" by edison
"elbow" by pauk

all songs from the monome community remix project

Special thanks to the workshop organizers and participants, and to the sponsors Jovoto, Modulor and Betahaus.

Continue the conversation: twitter hashtag #od10beta

2010 CC Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0

join our Flickr group

Fri, Feb 12, 2010  Permanent link
Categories: open design, community, DIY, product design, KS12, betahaus, Social Media Week Berlin, Berlin, design, fabrication, creative commons, autodocumentary, immediation, bio-plastics, laser cutter, 3D printer, arduino, innovation, #od10beta
Sent to project: Epiphanies

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Augmented Reality vs. Aura Recognition [part 2]
Project: Polytopia

This post was first published as part two of a series of three posts on on Augmentology 1[L]0[L]1

Part 2: Infinite Summer Afternoons



Images from Initiations-Studies II by Panos Tsagaris with Kimberley Norcott

Having summarily rejected the term augmented reality for the reasons listed here, I’ll now propose alternate terminology to describe the phenomenon. The following elements contribute to this formation:

• The mobile web will enable us to become aware of metadata that was previously obscured in day-to-day life.


• Many current AR applications pride themselves on exposing indications of present metadata relationships which are not as readily apparent as traditional urban indicators (think: fashion).


• Contemporary visions of AR as something which will merely allow us to hold up our smart phones and look through an AR “window”.

This process of metadata revealing is termed “aura recognition” (or aurec for short). In a future post I will address what I see as shortcomings of visual interfaces for aurec.

In his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935), Walter Benjamin makes the following observations regarding aura:

“If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience the aura of those mountains, of that branch. This image makes it easy to comprehend the social bases of the contemporary decay of the aura. It rests on two circumstances, both of which are related to the increasing significance of the masses in contemporary life. Namely, the desire of contemporary masses to bring things “closer” spatially and humanly, which is just as ardent as their bent toward overcoming the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction. Every day the urge grows stronger to get hold of an object at very close range by way of its likeness, its reproduction.”

Certainly – since 1935 – these two “social bases” identified by Benjamin have reached their apex in contemporary digital life. Never before have we had as much convenience in bringing things – whether physical objects or information – into our immediate proximity (think: Amazon, Ebay, Google). Neither have we had the experience of such widespread meme and brand propagation in our physical environment (eg shopping malls, international airports, and fast food franchises). Benjamin continues:

“Unmistakably, reproduction as offered by picture magazines and newsreels differs from the image seen by the unarmed eye. Uniqueness and permanence are as closely linked in the latter as are transitoriness and reproducibility in the former. To pry an object from its shell, to destroy its aura, is the mark of a perception whose “sense of the universal equality of things” has increased to such a degree that it extracts it even from a unique object by means of reproduction. Thus is manifested in the field of perception what in the theoretical sphere is noticeable in the increasing importance of statistics. The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception.”

This “sense of the universal equality of things” is the hallmark of the web. All searches are, ostensibly, equal before Google. Yet, among the ruins of this auric destruction, the web is simultaneously imbuing our lives with all kinds of unique and permanent phenomena. These phenomena make up the essence of our digital auras; auras created less by physical objects than by the specificity of context, relationship and juxtaposition. Aura Recognition is the means by which we access these phenomena.

Consider for instance how unique it is to geophysically meet someone who you’ve only previously known online. In the best case scenario, aurec will help us make sense of the emotional significance of digital phenomenon in ways which are meaningful and helpful. Location based services (think: GPS technology) provoke new experiences which are just as dependent on proximity as Benjamin’s proverbial summer afternoon.

(to be continued in "Part 3: The Crystal Ball")

Sat, Feb 6, 2010  Permanent link
Categories: augmented reality, semantics, aurec, definitions, Walter Benjamin, Panos Tsagaris, ubiquitous computing
Sent to project: Polytopia

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Augmented Reality vs. Aura Recognition [part 1]
Project: Polytopia

This post was first published as part one of a series of three posts on on Augmentology 1[L]0[L]1



Part 1: Absurd Assumptions

As many opinion leaders have noted, Augmented Reality (AR) may very well be the next evolutionary step in bringing the metadata of the web into our day-to-day lives. Some suggest that AR technology may even surpass the Web in its sustained impact on culture.



While I whole-heartedly agree with this observation, the use of the term “Augmented Reality” may actually impede any progress forged by these technologies, especially in terms of broad/mainstream acceptance.

The first reason why the actual phrase “Augmented Reality” may impede the cultural uptake of associated technologies is via the use of the word “augmented” – meaning to raise or make larger. AR enthusiasts seem to be comfortable implying that this new technology is somehow the first technology to augment or enhance our reality. This seems absurd, as human societies have a well-documented history of using biochemical technology to augment reality in the tradition of psychotropic plant-aided shamanism. The innovation of written language was a concrete visualization of reality-augmenting metadata. The city may also be considered an extension of reality considering cities are highly constructed frameworks of architecture, roads, sewers, electrical and telephone lines. It seems more relevant to utilize a word that more accurately describes the idiosyncratic peculiarities of a mobile web-ready experience.

My second reason for objecting to the AR term stems from when the word “reality” is employed in relation to what are (in most cases) mobile-web applications. This usage implies that other computer applications are not affecting reality, or at least are not affecting reality sufficiently to be labeled accordingly. This also seems an absurd assumption; the host of software which has prevailed during the history of computing have had an affect on reality too (this, of course, is a total understatement). If it were not for preceding software which has already changed our reality, these so-called “augmented reality” applications would not even exist. Furthermore, this use of “reality” in this context indicates that there is one concrete reality which we are in the process of altering with specific technology. Yet, each of us have our own subjective “reality” experience, with some physicists even postulating theories of a holographic reality. While standards for augmented reality ought to be open to ensure accessibility by any mobile web-enabled device, it is a fallacy to interpret these standards as a consensus on reality itself. This new technology is posed to allow us to customize and tweak our own experience of our reality like never before, as well as the “reality” we share with others.

(to be continued in "Part 2: Infinite Summer Afternoons")

Sat, Jan 16, 2010  Permanent link
Categories: augmented reality, semantics, aurec, definitions
Sent to project: Polytopia

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Steampunk Tendencies
Project: Polytopia

Punchcard Phone by Marek Bereza

Steampunk Tendencies
aka Ways in Which the 21st Century May Resemble the 19th Century

• patronage of the arts (on a distributed social micro-finance model)
  
• private clubs (in the form of walled-garden networks)
  
• craftsmanship and customization (of bespoke digital experiences)
  
• cottage industry (of knowledge workers in internet and aurec)
  
• barter economies (made viable with internet and aurec)
  
• flaneurs (of the networked city)
  
• social community values (exhibited as global affinity networks)
  
• diversity of news media (via personal publishing)

...to be continued ;)

PS: aurec = aura + recognition, my preferred term for so-called "augmented reality" – more on this coming soon.

Fri, Jan 1, 2010  Permanent link
Categories: steampunk
Sent to project: Polytopia

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Small Room Tango

Tango for upright piano and practice room.
New York
2004

Tue, Dec 22, 2009  Permanent link
Categories: videos

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